


Captive Sun

by Ramzes



Series: Night So Dark and Star So Pale [9]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Multi, Remorse, arthur has no idea, character exploration, happy end, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-29
Updated: 2018-04-29
Packaged: 2019-04-29 22:46:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14482857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ramzes/pseuds/Ramzes
Summary: Arthur's focus on saving Elia from herself has been a real one. But it has also been a means to an end. A way to escape remorse over the consequences his inactions brought to people other than her. A method that stopped working when saving worked.





	Captive Sun

“Three throws, all in the circles of the target, from the very centre to the outer circles. Each one thrown before the last one hits the wood. Now!”

Perros Blackmont threw Arel a resentful look but to Arthur’s amazement, he followed the order as strictly as he knew how. The second spear was a way off the very midst of the circle but Arthur thought it was a genuine miscalculation, rather than one of the intentional sabotages the boy was so fond of. As his squire headed off to collect the spears back, all of them still trembling from the power of his throws, Arthur stared at his brother. “How did you do it?” he asked. “I thought he’d be trying your patience for weeks. Instead, it looks like he has been practicing for real for weeks.”

Arel shrugged. “It was just the matter of finding the words,” he said.

“And what were the words?” Arthur asked.

“I told him that if he tried hard enough, one day he might just be able to challenge me and survive.”

Arthur gasped. Sometimes, his calm, collected brother surprised him even more than Ashara. “He trains himself to best you so he can one day challenge you over… something, no matter what?” he asked anyway because he wanted to make sure that this ludicrous, eerie incentive had truly been his brother’s intention.

Arel smiled. “At the time he’s knighted and good enough to reasonably expect to prevail over me, he’ll be a  man grown. Perhaps he’ll be able to understand.”

Arthur wished he could be this hopeful. He had been knighted for over a decade and he still understood next to nothing about men, women, and weakness. Whatever he had learned in his youth, his years as a Kingsguard had obliterated and whatever little had survived afterwards, Elia had taken care to confuse beyond hope. Right now, he felt he could not understand anything about fathers and sons either. “And if he doesn’t?” he asked. “Are you going to play Bael the Bard to his Lord Stark?”

Arel frowned. “Bael who?”

“Bael the…” Arthur started and then realized that he’d better shut up. The non-existing bard was something that he had heard from the Stark girl, at the time she had grown bored with Rhaegar, bored with the tower, bored with their attempts to humour her by pretending to fight her as an equal. She had been following him around, boring him to death with her talks about her home – because she couldn’t get Rhaegar bored, Arthur had suspected. He would just nod without actually listening to her.

This had been before the raven came, of course.

“This sounds almost like something the Prince would say,” Mors Blackmont said, still sending his arrows at the fence at the far end of the practice yard with swiftness that could make one dizzy to watch.

There was no doubt as to whom he was referring. The Prince, that was how Arthur had always called Lewyn Martell in his thoughts, even after he had, in fact, become one of them. As helpless as them…

Arel gave the young man a look of curiosity. “Is the story true?” he asked. “You wanted to be his squire so much that you caught him unawares and threw a knife in the table between his fingers as he wasn’t watching?”

Mors looked slightly ashamed. “I didn’t harm him at all,” he said defensively. “I only  wanted to show him what I could do since he had already told my lord father he wasn’t interested in taking any new squires.”

Arthur was taken aback at how pleased hearing this made him. So, Lewyn had not just decided that Arthur wasn’t this special after all. He had taken someone just as special after Arthur… and more dangerous as well.

Or less, as it had turned out.

“Where are you going?” Arel asked. “Take some wine before you move! You look terrible all of a sudden. Are you feeling fine?”

“Yes,” Arthur said. “Completely.”

It was true, in a way. The pain that he had forbidden himself to feel was catching up with him and yet he felt a stir of warmth, the like of which he had not experienced in… how long? The last time he had been home, a part of the guard of honour that was to accompany Prince Rhaegar’s betrothed to King’s Landing. That had been the last time Arel had looked upon him with affection and concern. Until now.

By the Seven, was affection going to undo him when hostility had not?

His steps brought him to a place where he had never entered before, not in all his years at the Kingsguard, when he had gotten to know every nook and cranny of the Red Keep in search of a potential danger to his King. Every nook and cranny. Except for this one.

The Maidenvault looked as impotent as anyone could imagine, danger-wise. Arthur strode in the vast echoing halls, not as immaculately kept as the rest of the royal residence but still maintained in some shape – perhaps cleaned and washed every two weeks or so. The wood of the furniture had gone dark, as well as the tapestries. The gild had turned to darkened bronze, the upholsteries and carpets carrying him through the ages, to a time long gone. A guilded prison. An abandoned prison now, only used when prominent guests had absolutely nowhere to be put in. The perfect place for a determined murderer, Arthur realized now and wondered why he had never thought about this before.

A spacious bedchamber invited him to come and rest. He stopped at the threshold and stared at the iron grating that fractured the sun in sixteen pieces. A broken sun. Arthur knew that before this vault had acquired its moniker as the prison of King Baelor’s sister, it had served as a far less notorious prison: Daeron, the First of His Name, the Young Dragon, had kept the Dornish hostages here. Perhaps this was the bedchamber where Elsbet Toland who had later wed the Lord of Starfall had lived. Perhaps this had been where little Astra Dayne had caught the illness that had led to her return to Dorne not on a splendid mare but in a litter, to die home.

Perhaps this was because Arthur knew his history – but the fact was that in this abode of faded glory and despair, he felt the same feeling of fate and belonging as he did at the crypt of Starfall.

The pain brought him to his knees. The names started flashing through his mind. The Prince, of course, first and foremost, always and everywhere, but also Edric Karsen, the son of the castellan of Starfall. Gulian Dalt. Algor Allyrion. Darval Jordayne… Men he had known, boys he had grown up with. All dead, most of them at the Trident. While he had…

Had he ever truly believed that Elia was the only one who mattered? Oh, she did matter, and she mattered most of all. But suffering her vengefulness, focusing on her… had it not also been a means to an end? A way not to think of all those who could have lived, should have lived if he had not been keeping his mouth shut in the face of Rhaegar’s lunacy? If he had not been following orders, playing a nursemaid as they had been dying? He could not honestly say that it had not.

Now, when Elia had started allowing him in her life, if not her bed yet, he had no excuse to avoid the other matter anymore.

“I’m sorry,” he said in a soft voice that echoed disproportionately loud in the empty vault. “I’m sorry.”

“What are you sorry for?”

He spun around, the dagger ready in his hand. Elia jumped out of the way, as if she had expected this attack.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded, forcing himself to stay calm when all he wanted was shake her hard! Did she not know how dangerous it was to startle him like this?

She did  not look subdued. “Sometimes, I come here,” she said. “It started when Aerys brought me here from Dragonstone. I felt… closer to home here.”

Arthur nodded. “I understand.”

“What are you sorry for?” she asked again. “What, Arthur?”

He shrugged. He could just as well tell her, why not?

“For what I did to them. By taking the wrong side. Your uncle and all others.”

She nodded and something in her face shifted, much like the way his brother’s gaze upon him had become softer those days. She took him by the hand and brought him to a small chamber furnished almost like a sept. Perhaps Rhaena Targaryen had ordered this.  Arthur wondered if the additional bars of the gratings had been her idea as well. Here, the sun was even more fractured, but it was there.

“I pray for them here,” Elia said simply and they knelt in front of the statuettes. All throughout, she did not let go of his hand and when she finally did, just before they left, Arthur felt no surprise as he heard her whisper, “Tonight, you’ll stand guard by my door.”

“I’ll be there,” he replied just as quietly right before they went out into a sun that almost blinded them with its intensity and the hotness of its caress.

* * *

**The End**


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